When we introduced the VNX and VNXe at the beginning of 2011 to replace our CLARiiON and Celerra products, we were sort of holding our collective breath here at EMC.
Up close, we knew they were amazing products -- but would customers and partners embrace them?
The answer now is clear: it's an unequivocal "yes!"
Both products have turned out to be runaway successes. We're delighting our existing customers and partners, and we've also been able to attract a lot more new adherents to the fold. Along the way, the product has garnered more industry awards than I care to count.
Industry market share numbers have shifted as a result. It's now the hot product to beat if you're a competitor in this category.
Not one to rest on our laurels, the EMC team has been busy extending and enhancing the VNX and VNXe offering, and -- as part of EMC World 2012 -- there are new capabilities to consider.
My personal favorite in this batch of announcements? The new EMC AppSync -- integrated data protection that creates protection as a service for virtual environments.
You're going to like this one as well :)
Yes, the product continues to exceed our expectations: customer and partner adoption, quality, performance, serviceability, our ability to enhance it over time, partner-friendliness, ease-of-use, and so on.
There's always room to better your game, but I'm going to give the team kudos for what they've achieved this time around.
A new VNX/VNXe is now sold every ten minutes around the globe. 60% of the new VNXes now go out with flash in some form.
The VNX FAST Cache feature, in particular, has been a game-changer for performance in this storage category. Nobody wants to benchmark against us using customer workloads these days :(
So, what's new with the family?
A New VNXe -- the 3150
The new VNXe 3150 continues on existing themes: more performance (thanks to a new quad-core processor) and more capacity (up to 100 drives w/expansion) packaged in a 2U rack slot.
There are also new drive choices for all the VNXe, including a new 3TB 3.5" 7200-rpm nearline SAS drive.
One of the most popular use cases for the VNXe is ROBO -- remote office / branch office -- so the team has created Unisphere Remote, allowing an administrator to manage literally thousands of VNXe arrays from a single console if needed.
Another useful enhancement comes to the VNX and how it uses available media, including flash. Thanks to improvements in automatic device configuration and automatic load balancing, start-up costs for introducing flash into your environment have now dropped a claimed 38% -- in addition to consistent reductions in flash media costs.
Many of our customers have now started to realize the amazing levels of performance they can push out of their VNX arrays, and are starting to clamor for more advanced tools to analyze and optimize overall performance in virtualized environments.
The new offering is the VNX Storage Analytics Suite.
Interestingly enough, it's built on top of VMware's vCenter Operations Management Suite, and can be easily upgraded to the full vC Ops product if needed.
Because it's an extension of the VMware management environment, it does a great job of giving administrators that end-to-end infrastructure performance view.
Snaps have once again been enhanced. The new code supports up to 256 writeable snaps per LUN, a total of 32,768 per array, and snaps-of-snaps as well -- not to mention full clones as well. These snap/clone capabilities complement the CCR and CDP capabilities of RecoverPoint for a very wide variety of use cases.
But how do you make all those snaps and remote replicas more usable for IT administrators?
The Big News -- EMC AppSync
In more modest environments, you really don't have the luxury of IT specialists. There's usually a small number of very hard-working people who wear a lot of different hats during the day: server, network, virtualization, application, storage, et. al.
Historically, EMC has offered integrated data protection management products (e.g. EMC Data Protection Advisor) that provided a single point of control and reporting for all data protection activities - very useful in larger environments, but hard to justify in more modest settings.
The team worked on a related premise -- how can we make data protection management easy to consume in smaller (and presumably virtualized) environments?
If you were thinking "data protection as a service" -- what would it look like?
The result was EMC AppSync -- which I think is one of the more useful capabilities in the VNX portfolio going forward.
In a nutshell, the storage admin creates a service catalog of desired protection levels: gold, silver, etc. much the way they would for storage performance.
Those protection service options are conveniently exposed to anyone who needs to consume them: storage admins, server admins, Exchange admins, application admins, DBAs, etc.
Protection service consumers anywhere in IT can choose their own levels, or use pre-defined ones. These same people can verify protection for the pieces they care about, and can do self-service recovery if needed.
For example, an Exchange admin can recover an individual mailbox from a storage snapshot without anyone else being involved. Or a database administrator can recover from a remote copy.
From an architectural level, the protection level follows the virtual machine as it moves around in the cluster.
EMC AppSync works with snaps and remote replicas. It knows about important things like application consistency and verifying the integrity of a recovery copy *before* you try to use it :)
Very slick, very integrated with VMware, very easy to set up and use.
Click. Protect. Done. Worth your time to learn about.
I'm guessing AppSync is going to be very popular indeed. And, to the best of our collective knowledge, there's nothing really like it in the marketplace today.
The VNX Team Keeps Rolling Along
Sometimes, it's nice to see radical innovative technology. More often, it's nice to see great products and great ideas evolve and mature. With this round of VNX/VNXe announcements, it's more of the latter, and I think that's a good thing.
Customer and partners have voted with their hard-earned money that we're doing the right things. Thank you for your vote of confidence in EMC and VNX.
I can't argue with a strategy of doing more of the same :)
What caught my eye on this blog was AppSync, what it does and the claim that "There is nothing like it in the market place". This got me thinking as to what is so special about this feature and after some research, I realised that it is nothing new. NetApp has Snapmanager, IBM has FlashCopy Manager and Hitachi has Application Protector. Perhaps the GUI offered by AppSync is more user friendly, but the functionality provided seems to be nothing new.
Posted by: DumaDum | June 20, 2012 at 12:30 AM
The best way to appreciate the differences is via a demo, showing automated discovery, protection, mooring and recovery. For now, it's unique.
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | June 20, 2012 at 07:52 AM
In Mexico, we live in very modest environments, working 14 hours, day by day, with many hats and suits and I am very proud of it. I read tech white papers meanwhile getting back to home in the metro subway because there is no time and budget for formal training.
I configure our first EMC VNXe3100 and our first VMware server to our company infrastructure and now we are going for our first DAE.
Viva Mexico! and EMC! too...
Posted by: Rodolfo Reyes-Chilpa | November 08, 2012 at 08:51 PM
Hola Rodolfo -- que tal?
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a note. Hope things go well for you, and please stay in touch!
-- Chuck
Posted by: Chuck Hollis | November 09, 2012 at 08:42 AM